Some prognosticators anticipate British pop soul singer Sam Smith to gobble trophies Sunday at the 57th annual Grammy Awards ceremony.
He could walk away from Sunday’s ceremony with the grand slam, sweeping the four biggest categories: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist. Only Christopher Cross, in 1981, has done this.
But it doesn't sit well that Smith's nomination for Record and Song of the Year comes for co-writing "Stay With Me," a song that made recent headlines about its authorship.
Late last month, Smith reached an agreement with legendary rocker Tom Petty and Electric Light Orchestra mastermind Jeff Lynne to share songwriting credit on “Stay With Me” because of its remarkable similarity to Petty’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down.” Lynne produced and co-authored the track with Petty.
It’s not Smith’s fault for penning a song so similar to Petty’s, but it doesn’t speak well of the Grammy Awards when one of the five finalists for Song of the Year — supposed to represent the best songs written during the eligibility period — is a tune audiences have literally heard before.
Despite the change in credit, leaders at the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Grammy Awards, already decided Petty and Lynne are ineligible to win Grammys for the song.
"Since they did not do any new writing for this work, we are considering their original work to have been interpolated," Senior Vice President of Awards Bill Freimuth told The Wall Street Journal last week.
Petty and Lynne need not be added to the nomination to make this problematic for the Grammys. Having the song as a finalist in two of its biggest categories undermines the awards to an extent that it reinforces some of the worst criticisms about the show and the ceremony.
While the awards have made the move toward winners that reflect a more contemporary flavor in recent years — more hot-right-now Daft Punk and Adele, less late-career Steely Dan and Herbie Hancock — it’s still skewing more toward what sells units than what garners some of the highest critical marks.
AlbumOfTheYear.org, a site that aggregates critical scores from major music publications and websites, showed only Beyoncé's self-titled fifth studio LP with glowing critical praise, finishing 13th in 2013. The other four, all released in 2014, ranked thusly: Beck's Morning Phase at 110th, Pharrell Williams' G I R L at 563rd, Smith's In the Lonely Hour at 636th and Ed Sheeran's X at 652nd. These records are not critical darlings, a detraction often lobbed at the Grammy Awards, but those aren’t necessarily the records remembered and beloved years later, either.
However, it underscores the problem with possibly honoring Smith for "Stay With Me." The fact that it bears a strong resemblance to a 25-year-old hit shows that, often, what is successful in music is what is familiar.
That calls to mind a recent NSFW interview Canadian prog metal artist Devin Townsend gave to Decibel Magazine about creating a song with the team that produces the likes of Nickelback and Daughtry. He was unsatisfied with the final product, saying it will never see the light of day because it does some things he hates most about the music industry.
“It’s everything I dislike about music, with my voice on it,” he said. “It’s a formula.”
Townsend said the formula even breaks down into chord progressions, times of year and lyrical topics, but for him, “music is about expressing the unexpressable.”
This is where I sit as a fan, critic and appreciator. I want to be challenged and encouraged to think outside of my comfort zone, to hear a message delivered in a way that is not familiar, not predictable.
And, with all due respect to Smith, not in the same way Tom Petty did it 25 years ago.
For the Grammys to nominate “Stay With Me” for two of its highest honors is not rewarding the best in music, but rewarding the music industry itself.
That's not exactly a new criticism of the Grammy Awards, but it's one nominations such as "Stay With Me" do little to change.
A comparison of "Stay With Me" and "I Won't Back Down:"
Comments